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I’m at the O’Reilly Strata Big Data Conference in Santa Clara, CA this week where there’s lots of buzz about the value and reality of big data. It’s a fun time to be part of a hot new market in technology. But, of course, a hot new market brings a new set of challenges. After talking to several attendees, I would not be surprised if someone took out an advertisement in the San Francisco Guardian that reads: SEEKING BDT (Big Data Talent) “Middle-aged attractive company seeks hot-to-trot data geek for mutually enjoyable discrete relationship, mostly involving analytics. Must enjoy long discussions about wild statistical models, short walks to the break room and large quantities of caffeine.” The feedback from the presentations and attendees at Strata mimics the results from a Big Data survey that Pentaho released last week showing there is a lack of current skills to address new big data technologies such as Hadoop among existing staff and more generally on the market. This is good news for folks looking for jobs in Big Data and a good indication for others who want to learn new skills. The market...

In the last couple of weeks the feud between The NY Times Editor, John Broder – and Tesla Motors’ CEO, Elon Musk has played out in the media. It all started when Broder took a highway trip between Washington D.C. and Boston, cruising in Tesla’s Model S luxury sedan. The purpose of the trip was to range test the car between two new supercharging stations. This 200 miles trip was well under the Model S’s 265-mile estimated range. But nonetheless the trip was filled with anxiety for Broder . Fearful of not reaching his charging destination, he had to turn off the battery-draining amenities such as radio and heater (in a 30 degree weather) to finally reach his destination - feet and knuckles “frozen”. In rebutting Broder’s claims, Tesla’s chief executive, Elon Musk, has charged that the story was faked, that Mr. Broder intentionally caused his car to fail. On his Tesla blog , he released graphs and charts, based on driving logs that contest many of the details of Mr. Broder’s article. With the logs now published, one thing is clear -- Tesla’s use of predictive analytics helped them...

Pentaho and Xyratex today announced our strategic partnership to deliver the world’s first integrated Big Data analytics and scalable storage solution. We have been working on this joint initiative for some time with the ClusterStor team at Xyratex. ClusterStor is the worlds fastest and most performant storage sub-system. This will be significantly enhanced by the addition of Hortonworks Hadoop and Pentaho Business Analytics. Xyratex and Pentaho will make Big Data, Fast Data. This solves a key pain point for Xyratex’s customers. With all of the compute, storage, database and analytics in one true integrated platform, this appliance will eliminate the large data silos as well as put all of that Big Data, into the hands of the business users. And it will do that fast! The ClusterStor, Hadoop and Pentaho Big Data Appliance will deliver business analytics on huge data sets, at the lowest TCO and allow the ClusterStor customers to realize rapid business value from their data with a very short time to value. Xyratex has taken the complexity of deploying Hadoop away from the customer with this integrated appliance. Critically, ClusterStor also meets all the key criteria in...